Magpie Murders (52 page)

‘He didn’t care. He had a million pounds. Then he had ten million pounds. He could have had a hundred million pounds. But he didn’t have what he wanted which was respect, the imprimatur of the great writer. And as mad as it sounds, he wasn’t the only successful writer who felt that way. Look at Ian Fleming and Conan Doyle. Even A.A. Milne! Milne disliked Winnie the Pooh
because
he was so successful. But I think the big difference is that Alan hated Pünd from the very start. He never wanted to write any of the novels and when he became famous he couldn’t wait to get rid of him.’

‘Are you saying I killed him because he wouldn’t write any more?’

‘No, Charles.’ I dug into my handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes. To hell with office regulations. We were talking murder here. ‘We’ll get to why you killed him in a minute. But first of all I’m going to tell you what happened and also how you gave yourself away.’

‘Why don’t we start with that, Susan? I’d be interested to know.’

‘How you gave yourself away? The funny thing is I remember the moment exactly. It was like an alarm bell went off in my head but I didn’t make the connection. I suppose it was because I simply couldn’t imagine you as a killer. I kept thinking you were the last person to want Alan dead.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, when I was in your office, the day we heard that Alan had committed suicide, you made a point of telling me that you hadn’t been to Framlingham for six months, not since March or April. It was an understandable lie. You were trying to distance yourself from the scene of the crime. But the trouble is, when we drove up to the funeral together, you warned me to take a different route to avoid the roadworks at Earl Soham. They’d only just started – Mark Redmond told me that – and the only way you could have known about them is if you’d been up more recently. You must have driven through Earl Soham on the Sunday morning when you killed Alan.’

Charles considered what I had said and smiled half-ruefully. ‘You know that’s exactly the sort of thing Alan would have put in one of his books.’

‘I thought so too.’

‘I’ll have a little more whisky if you don’t mind.’

I poured some for him and a little more for myself. I needed to keep a clear head but the Glenmorangie went very well with the cigarette. ‘Alan didn’t give you the manuscript of
Magpie Murders
at the Ivy Club,’ I said. ‘It actually came here in the post on Tuesday, 25 August. Jemima opened the envelope and saw it. You must have read it the same day.’

‘I finished it on Wednesday.’

‘You had dinner with Alan on Thursday evening. He was already in London because he had an afternoon appointment with his doctor – Sheila Bennett. Her initials were in his diary. I wonder if that was when she told him the bad news – that his cancer was terminal? I can’t imagine what must have been going through his head when he sat down with you, but of course it was a horrible evening for both of you. After dinner, Alan went back to his London flat and the following day he wrote you a letter, apologising for his bad behaviour. It was dated 28 August, which was the Friday, and my guess is that he dropped it in by hand. I’ll come back to that letter in a minute, but I want to get all my ducks in a row.’

‘Timelines, Susan. They always were your strong suit.’

‘You faked that business with the spilled coffee and fired Jemima on Friday morning. She was completely innocent but you were already planning to kill Alan. You were going to make it look like suicide but it would only work if you hadn’t read
Magpie Murders
. Jemima had actually handed you the novel a few days earlier. She’d probably seen Alan’s letter too. You knew I was coming back from Dublin on Friday afternoon and it was absolutely essential that she and I shouldn’t meet. As far as I was concerned, you would be at home over the weekend, reading
Magpie Murders
. The same as me. It was your alibi. But what mattered just as much was that you should have no reason to kill Alan.’

‘You still haven’t told me the reason.’

‘I will.’ I unscrewed a bottle of ink on Charles’s desk and used the lid as an ashtray. I could feel the whisky warming my stomach, encouraging me to continue. ‘Alan drove back to Framlingham on either Friday evening or Saturday morning. You must have known that he’d broken up with James and you guessed that he would be alone in the house. You drove up on Sunday morning but when you arrived you saw that there was someone with him, up on the roof. That was John White, his neighbour. You parked your car behind a bush where it wouldn’t be seen – I noticed the tyre tracks when I was there – and watched what happened. The two men had an altercation, which turned into a scuffle, and you took a photograph of the two of them, just in case it might be useful. And it was, wasn’t it, Charles? When I told you that I believed Alan had been murdered, you sent it to me, to put me on the wrong track.

‘But it wasn’t White who killed him. He left and you watched him take the shortcut back to his house, through the trees. That was when you made your move. You went into the house. Presumably Alan thought you had come to continue the conversation that had begun at the Ivy Club. He invited you to join him for breakfast on the tower. Or maybe you talked your way up there. How you got up there doesn’t really matter. The point is that when you got the opportunity, when his back was to you, you pushed him off.

‘That was only part of it. After you’d killed him, you went into Alan’s study – because you’d read
Magpie Murders
and you knew exactly what you were looking for. It was a gift! A suicide letter, written in Alan’s own hand! We both know Alan always wrote the first draft by hand. You had the letter that Alan had hand-delivered on Friday morning. But there was a second letter in the book and you realised you could use it. I really have to kick myself because I’ve been an editor for more than twenty years and this must be the only crime ever committed that an editor was born to solve. I knew there was something strange about Alan’s suicide letter, but I didn’t see what it was. I know now. Alan wrote pages one and two on the Friday morning. But page three, the actual page that signals his intention to kill himself, has been taken from the book. It’s no longer Alan’s voice. There’s no slang, no swearing. It’s formal, slightly stilted, as if it’s been written by someone for whom English is a second language. “…
for me there can be no possibility of a reprieve
.” “
It is my hope that you will be able to complete the work of my book
.” It’s not a letter from Alan to you. It’s a letter from Pünd to James Fraser – and the book he refers to is not
Magpie Murders
, it’s
The Landscape of Criminal Investigation
.

‘You were incredibly lucky. I don’t know exactly what Alan wrote to you but the new page – what eventually became page three – fitted in perfectly. You had to cut a little bit off the top, though. There’s one line missing – the line that reads “
Dear James
”. I could have worked that out if I’d measured the pages, but I’m afraid that was something I missed. And there was something else. To complete the illusion that all four pages belonged to the same, single letter, you added numbers in the right top corner but if I’d looked more closely, I’d have seen that the numbers are darker than the letters. You used a different pen. Otherwise, it was perfect. For Alan’s death to appear like suicide you needed a suicide letter and now you had one.

‘It still had to be delivered. The letter that Alan had actually sent you, the one apologising about the dinner which you had received the day before, had been hand-delivered. You needed it to appear as if it had been posted from Ipswich. The answer was simple. You found an old envelope – I suppose it was one that Alan had sent you at some other time – and put your manufactured suicide note in there. You assumed that no one would look too closely at the envelope. It was the letter that mattered. But as it happens I did notice two things. The envelope was torn. I assume you’d deliberately ripped through the postmark to obliterate the date. But there was something much more striking. The letter was handwritten but the envelope was typed. It exactly reflected something that had happened in
Magpie Murders
and of course it stuck in my mind.

‘So let’s get to the heart of the matter. You’d used part of a letter written by Atticus Pünd and unfortunately, if your plan was going to work, nobody could read it. If anyone put two and two together, the entire suicide theory would collapse. So that was why the chapters had to disappear. I have to say, I was puzzled why you were so unenthusiastic when I suggested travelling up to Framlingham to find them but now I know why you didn’t want them to be found. You removed the handwritten pages. You took Alan’s notebooks. You cleared the hard drive on his computer. It would mean losing the ninth book in the series – or postponing it until we could get someone else to finish it – but for you it was a price well worth paying.’

Charles sighed a little and set down his glass, which was empty again. There was a strange, relaxed atmosphere in the room. The two of us could have been discussing the proof of a novel as we had done so many times in the past. For some reason, I was sorry that Bella wasn’t here. I don’t know why. Perhaps it would have made everything that was unfolding feel a little more normal.

‘I had a feeling that you’d see through it all, Susan,’ he said. ‘You’re very clever. I’ve always known that. However, the motive! You still haven’t told me
why
I killed Alan.’

‘It was because he was going to pull the plug on Atticus Pünd. Isn’t that right? It all goes back to that dinner at the Ivy Club. That was when he told you. He had a radio interview with Simon Mayo the following week and it would give him the perfect opportunity to do it, the one thing that would give him a good laugh before he died, something that mattered even more than seeing the final book in print. You lied to me when you said he wanted to cancel the interview. It was still in his diary and the radio station didn’t know he was going to drop out. I think he wanted to go ahead. I think he was desperate.’

‘He was sick,’ Charles said.

‘In more ways than one,’ I agreed. ‘What I find extraordinary is that he had been planning this all along, from the very day that he invented Atticus Pünd. What sort of writer builds a self-destruct mechanism into his own work and watches it tick away for eleven long years? But that’s what Alan did. It was the reason why the last book had to be called Magpie Murders and nothing else. He had built an acronym into the nine titles. The first letters spelled out two words.’

‘An anagram.’

‘You knew?’

‘Alan told me.’

‘An anagram. But an anagram of what? In the end, it didn’t take me too long to work it out. It wasn’t the titles. They’re perfectly innocent. It wasn’t the characters. They were named after birds. It wasn’t the policemen. They were nicked out of Agatha Christie or based on people he knew. James Fraser was named after an actor. That just leaves one character.’

‘Atticus Pünd.’

‘It’s an anagram of “a stupid …”’

Forgive me if I don’t spell out that last word. You can work it out easily enough for yourself but personally, I hate it. Swear words in books have always struck me as lazy and over-familiar. But the ‘c’ word is more than that. It’s used by sour, frustrated men, nearly always about women. It’s a word full of misogyny – crudely offensive. And that’s what it all came down to! That was what Alan Conway thought about the character that his ex-wife had got him to write. It was what summed up his feelings about the whole detective genre.

‘He told you, didn’t he,’ I went on. ‘
That’s
what happened at the Ivy Club. Alan told you he was going to share his little secret with the entire world when he went on the Simon Mayo show the following week.’

‘Yes.’

‘And that was why you had to kill him.’

‘You’re absolutely right, Susan. Alan had drunk a fair bit – that very good wine I’d ordered – and he told me as we left the restaurant. He didn’t care. He was going to die anyway and he was determined to take Atticus with him. He was a devil. Do you know what would have happened if he had told people that? They would have hated him! There would have been no BBC television series – you can forget about that. We wouldn’t have sold another book. Not one. The entire franchise would have become valueless.’

‘So you did it for the money.’

‘That’s putting it very bluntly. But I suppose it’s true. Yes. I’ve spent eleven years building up this business and I wasn’t going to see it destroyed overnight by some ungrateful bastard who’d actually done very well out of us. I did it for my family and for my new grandson. You could say I did it in part for you – although I know you won’t thank me. I also did it for the millions of readers all over the world who had invested in Atticus, who’d enjoyed his stories and bought the books. I had absolutely no compunction whatsoever. My only regret is that you’ve managed to find out, which I suppose makes you my partner in crime.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, I suppose it depends on what you intend to do. Have you told anyone else what you’ve told me?’

‘No.’

‘Then you might take the view that you don’t need to. Alan is dead. He was going to die anyway. You’ve read the first page of his letter. He had at best six months. I shortened his life by that amount of time and quite possibly saved him a great deal of suffering along the way.’ He smiled. ‘I won’t pretend that was uppermost in my mind. I think I did the world a favour. We need our literary heroes. Life is dark and complicated but they shine out. They’re the beacons that we follow. We have to be pragmatic about this, Susan. You’re going to be the CEO of this company. My offer was made in good faith and it still stands. Without Atticus Pünd there will
be
no company. If you don’t want to think of yourself, think of everyone else in this building. Would you like to see them put out of their jobs?’

‘That’s a little unfair, Charles.’

‘Cause and effect, my dear. That’s all I’m saying.’